Feedback is neither good nor bad and receiving even good feedback (praise) can lead to bad results.
Feedback Kaleidoscope (Photo credit: krazydad / jbum)
If you want to grow and develop in business, or your career, or your relationships or just some activity you enjoy, you need feedback. Feedback that helps you grow.
That is why every person who is a champion at anything has mentors, coaches and other people who give them feedback.
The challenge for the person giving feedback is the make sure that it is constructive rather than bullying.
The feedback must be specific and relate to something that can be changed with a sound reason to change that action or mindset. There is a need to discuss how to implement the required change. The experience of the coach or mentor is useful but the person implementing it needs to adapt it to their “personality”.
And good feedback comes from discussion because of a desire to do better.
One challenges for bosses is to remember that their staff has an opinion on how to make things better too. If the boss wants a change to occur with an employee then the feedback needs to clearly state the problem, why it is a problem for the business and discuss how things could be improved. Often feedback, in these situations, needs to occur because the employee is unaware that what they do causes problems. This is especially true as companies hire other cultures and people with diverse backgrounds. Remember that it is possible that even two people from the same family will do things differently.
Feedback and discussion, awareness of the way to do things and achieve a better outcomes is difficult. It is one reason why business owners engage coaches and mentors.
And the challenge for the coach, boss or mentor is that they often are reflecting based on their own experience. They see the world through their own experiences and so when they give feedback they need to be careful. Coaching is about improving the other person rather than creating a clone.
When you hire a coach or mentor, you need to find the person or people who can help you achieve. Sometimes this is a person who has achieved the outcome you desire but often you will need to hire more than one coach to take you through several different aspects. In sports, a champion often has three or four coaches, each helping to work on a specific skill or area in which they have experience, understanding and the ability to analyze others. And that ability to know why to do something rather than just what to do that is critical to good feedback.
And feedback is something that if you want to excel in a particular area, you have to be willing to listen to, challenge and adapt. Feedback is hard to take. But if you learn to take feedback and internalize it, you can achieve whatever objective you really want and feel good once you achieve it.
Please leave a comment about your experience with feedback.
Roberta
A Passionate, Purposeful Performer
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March 31, 2012
Feedback has to take into account the mental attitude and altitude of the listener, as well. I don’t mean to coddle the listener, but to insure that the vocabulary chosen is one that will resonate with the listener. That’s the skill that a mentor employs to help the protege achieve and excel. Yielding valid feedback that employs “feelings”, “beliefs”, or “facts” that the mentee does not yet comprehend (and is one or two levels above the current state) will not meet that mark.
Roy A. Ackerman, Ph.D., E.A. recently posted..Was Spinoza Wrong?
The term I often use here Roy is to ensure that there is a rich shared map and both of us understand what is meant. It is often difficult without the full co-operation of both parties and so often the person receiving the feedback really is reluctant to hear. But that brings up the concept that feedback can just be a reflection and an opinion of the person giving it and should always be taken with a grain of salt because it is only an external perspective.
great post, very interesting what other people have to think about feedback, thank you for sharing this post and i wil be sure to be back to read more of your posts.
Andrew recently posted..Oracle’s Latest JavaFX move: Too little, Too Late
Thanks for visiting Andrew. Handling feedback is a critical factor to business success and yet is one of the poorest used and understood